Inclement weather can wreak havoc on our everyday lives, whether it is creating setbacks in construction projects, drenching outdoor events or jeopardizing personal safety. Thus, those in all walks of life must tune in daily for the latest weather reports concerning the next day or the next few hours. Unfortunately, it is impossible to constantly view a television or even listen to a radio to check for minute-to-minute changes in the weather. Even the best weather prognosticators might not be able to predict an unexpected tornado or a sudden downpour until an hour or even minutes before it happens. Therefore, people are often unaware of approaching inclement weather conditions due to the unpredictable nature of weather and the little to no advanced warning. Additionally, society in the United States and much of the world is becoming increasingly mobile. People are often on the go within cities (e.g., picking up their children at school, or taking children to a baseball game) as well as between cities (e.g., traveling salespeople, truck drivers, etc.). Providing a faster and more immediate alert mechanism to warn of upcoming weather changes and/or current weather conditions of a given location could result in substantial savings in time and energy as well as a reduction in injuries inflicted by violent weather conditions.
In addition to the lack of a sufficient alert system for inclement weather, weather reporting services frequently produce generalized weather reports covering extensive areas (e.g., an entire state or county). For example, snow storm warnings are often applied to several tens of counties at once with no indication of the probability or relevance of the warnings to specific latitude/longitude coordinates or user locations. Consequently, people may get alerts that are not appropriate or applicable to their particular locale because the weather forecast/warning is not sufficiently personalized. These false alarms may produce substantial problems in a variety of areas. For example, if the National Weather Service issues a winter storm warning for the Mid-Atlantic region, residents of both Maryland and Virginia would be alerted. However, the storm would most likely reach various parts of the two states at different times. Therefore, since these reports and warnings provide little in the way of individualized weather reporting according to specific locations, a construction crew working in northern Maryland may be erroneously alerted into thinking that the storm will strike within half an hour. In actuality, the storm does not hit northern Maryland until three hours later. As a result, the construction crew may fail to properly store and protect their equipment because they are under the mistaken impression that they have no time. They may also fail to capitalize on two additional hours of work and begin to fall behind on their schedule. Their equipment and tools may be damaged costing both the crew and the contracting company time and money. In another example, a study showed that, in 1992, the Wichita, Kans. restaurant industry incurred an unnecessary cost of approximately $1,000,000 in a weather related event due to a lack of geographic specificity of a tornado warning. A system that provides more particularized meteorological data specific to a person's location would alleviate such issues and provide advantages in time, efficiency and cost.
Other systems and methods have been proposed to provide more immediate meteorological data according to location. One such system is the Vehicle-Centric Weather Prediction System and Method (U.S. Pat. No. 6,603,405). However, the system and method in the '405 patent has a limited feature set and can be improved upon for use with ultra mobile devices, such as mobile phones. Therefore, a method and system are needed to report or alert current weather conditions at a mobile user's location on a mobile device using a rich feature set that takes advantage of a mobile phone's resident capabilities. As such, it would be useful to develop a weather warning/data system and method that interacts with a mobile device already owned and used by the general public.
There are also a number of systems available that provide storm warnings for specific locations. For example, there is “Notify!” from The Weather Channel®, “Mobile My-Cast®” by Digital Cyclone, Inc., and wireless weather from Accu-Weather. One deficiency of these systems is that they require the user to register for storm notifications for fixed locations. As such, these warning systems are not truly mobile since the services do not provide notifications for the particular and specific location of someone in motion nor do they provide service to someone who is situated at a non-registered location. Another deficiency of these services is that they implement a fixed menu of storm criteria. Specialized users (e.g., athletic trainers and railroad road masters) may consider high temperature warnings just as significant as lightning and thunder warnings. Since these services do not allow the user to fully customize a notification system over the widest range of meteorological possibilities, users may not receive warnings that they desire. Furthermore, none of these services have provisions for additional geohazards (e.g., volcanoes and earthquakes) or manmade hazards (e.g., homeland security threats).
The aforementioned problems give rise to the solution provided by the present invention.